Part Two — The Keys · The Threnody
Chapter Eighteen
USS Enterprise-D — Present Day
"Six weeks," Crusher said. "Minimum."
"Two days," said Worf.
"He has a tibial fracture, extensive third-degree burns below the knee, and two cracked ribs he hasn't mentioned." Beverly Crusher did not look up from her padd. "I have put a regenerator on the leg, a bone knitter on the tibia, and a sedative in his drip that he has been ignoring for forty minutes. You will stay in that bed, Lieutenant Commander, until I say otherwise."
"I am a Klingon."
"You are a patient."
Picard stood at the foot of the biobed with his hands behind him and waited for the exchange to reach its customary conclusion. It took ninety seconds. Worf, pale under the bright lights, his right leg encased in a humming cuff of white field, lay against the pillow with an expression of deeply offended dignity. Crusher straightened, tucked the padd under her arm, and gave Picard a short, eloquent look that said he is yours for ten minutes and not a second more.
She left. The doors closed. Worf turned his head.
"Captain. I wish to make a report."
"On the Vault."
"On Ms. Liang."
Picard did not move. "Go on."
"I have observed two things." Worf's voice was flat. "I wish to state them exactly, and without interpretation, as they are facts, and the interpretation is yours. The first occurred on the bridge of bronze. At the fourth step from the center, Ms. Liang stopped. She was about to step left. She stopped, as if she had been told something. Then she stepped right, which was correct. The pause lasted less than one second."
"She could have been reconsidering."
"She could. That is the interpretation. I saw a person receiving an instruction." Worf's jaw tightened. "The second occurred at the cradle. She took the ring from Vash. She held it. And she spoke to it in a language I do not know. Then in Standard. She said, Not yet."
Picard was perfectly still. "Not yet."
"Those words. Exactly."
"And you told no one."
"I am telling you." Worf's eyes did not leave his. "I do not make accusations on two observations. I report them. You will do what you judge correct. But I would not have her near the orb without a second person in the room."
"Thank you, Mister Worf."
"I wish it were otherwise," Worf said. "She is a brave woman. I saw her walk across fire."
"Yes." Picard looked at the white cuff on the Klingon's leg, and at the sedative drip that was, at last, beginning to take hold. "So did I."
The Sarek came out of warp into the Kel-Varesh system at 0412 ship's time, a long gray Vulcan vessel with clean utilitarian lines and no decoration whatever. It hung off the Enterprise's bow with the quiet assurance of a thing built without any expectation of being admired.
On the main viewer, Captain T'Vel of the Sarek inclined her head. She was a small, straight-backed woman of perhaps ninety, with a face like carved stone and a pair of eyes that gave the impression of having spent a long time looking at very large things.
"Captain Picard. I am instructed to take custody of the anomalous object and its associated artifacts. I have brought a containment module adapted to the task."
"I have read the specifications," Picard said. "They are impressive."
"They are adequate."
"Captain, before we proceed, I would request one thing. A test. I have reason to believe the orb's field is not stable in the way your instruments assume. I would like your science officer to run a compatibility trial before we attempt a transfer."
T'Vel regarded him. "That is a logical request."
"I would not ask it otherwise."
"Then I will grant it."
The test took fifty minutes. Picard watched it from the science lab, through Data's console, as the Sarek's module was brought alongside the cargo bay in a slow, careful approach. A Vulcan scientist named T'Sai stood beside Data, arms folded, expression unreadable. A gray box the size of a small shuttle hung in the cargo bay's outer lock. On the lab's display, the orb's field hung within its own faint blue halo, eleven meters at rest, a little more than twelve now.
"Initiating field coupling," T'Sai said. "Ten percent."
The blue line ticked. Twelve point three meters.
"Twenty percent."
Twelve point nine.
"Thirty."
The display shivered. The numbers climbed, suddenly and steeply, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, as the module's own containment field reached out toward the orb's and the two began, with a horrible delicacy, to touch. The tone in the lab rose to a chord. Picard felt it in his teeth.
"Abort," T'Sai said.
"Aborting." Data's hands moved. The module's field collapsed. The numbers fell, more slowly than they had risen, and settled at fourteen point one. The tone sank back into the floor.
Nobody spoke.
"The coupling is not passive," T'Sai said at last. Her voice was quiet and exact. "The orb's field does not merely resist containment. It accommodates it. It expands to meet any field that touches it. In effect, it grows toward the container." She turned to Picard. "If we had completed the transfer, the field would have enlarged to fill the Sarek's module within minutes. In my estimate, it would then have extended to the hull."
"A fourteen-meter sphere centered on your ship," Data said.
"Yes. And continuing."
Picard looked at the number on the display, fourteen point one, glowing gently blue. It had been eleven point two at the start of the test. The orb had grown nearly three meters in fifty minutes, and it had not shrunk back.
"Then a transfer is out of the question," he said.
"I concur," said T'Sai.
T'Vel asked to speak with him afterward, and Picard, who had expected a formal note, found himself instead in a small plain Vulcan wardroom aboard the Sarek, facing a woman of ninety across a table that held two cups of cold green tea.
"I find the arrangement acceptable," T'Vel said. "Starfleet serves a hot beverage. We do not. Heat encourages talk."
"I had heard that."
"It is mostly inaccurate." She raised her cup. "People talk as much when the tea is cold."
Picard drank. It was bitter and faintly sweet, with an aftertaste like wet slate. He found he did not mind it.
"Captain." She set the cup down with precision. "I have a question that is not in my orders. I have read your reports and Dr. T'Sai's. I understand what the object is, and why it cannot be moved. I do not understand why you did not turn it over."
"The Admiral's order—"
"Was reasonable. You declined it, by an argument I found clever and a result I find fortunate." Her eyes did not move from his. "I did not ask for the argument. I asked for the reason."
He considered. The honest answer was complicated, and not wholly flattering. He decided to give it.
"Because I did not trust anyone else to look at it carefully," he said. "Because I had a colleague whose judgment I valued, and who asked me to. Because I believed, rightly or wrongly, that to hand it to a committee would be to stop paying attention. And because I have found, over a long career, that the things that matter most are very seldom understood from a distance."
"A preference for participation."
"If you like."
"It is a human preference. It is not an irrational one." T'Vel inclined her head. "My own people have it, and deny it. Sarek, whose name my ship bears, spent his life in rooms with people he did not understand, and understood them the better for it." She paused. "I have not heard the sound."
Picard looked up.
"Dr. T'Sai says I should be disturbed. Nearly everyone who approaches the object reports it. I do not hear it. I do not think I could." Her voice did not change. "I have been considering why."
"What have you concluded?"
"Nothing yet. Physiology, perhaps. Or training." She folded her hands. "At the Kolinahr a mind is taught to listen without joining. To perceive a thing entirely and remain apart from it. It is difficult. Few can learn it. I wonder whether what sings in your object is addressed only to those who can join."
"And those who cannot are silent to it."
"Or those who have learned not to."
Picard sat perfectly still. He thought, unwillingly, of Dara Liang on a bridge of bronze, humming over a river of fire, and of the ease with which she had joined.
"Captain," T'Vel said. "I will say something illogical. I am old, and permitted latitude." She leaned forward very slightly. "I believe you are correct to continue. If this thing can be answered, it will not be answered by those who cannot hear it. The Sarek's resources are yours. I will not interfere. And I will make it difficult for Starfleet Command to ask why."
"That is generous."
"It is logical." The faintest movement of her mouth might have been irony. "On occasion the two are the same."
Sorokin took the news in silence.
Her image filled the ready room screen, small and hard, and for several seconds she did not speak. Behind her the window showed a gray rain falling on the towers of Starfleet Headquarters. She looked, Picard thought, a little older than she had three days ago. The lines beside her mouth had set.
"I've read Captain T'Vel's report," she said. "I've read Dr. T'Sai's. They are unequivocal. The object can't be moved. It cannot be contained by any means presently available to the Federation." A pause. "You were right."
"I wish I had not been."
"Yes." Her eyes did not leave him. "Captain, I'm going to rescind the order. The Sarek will remain in company with the Enterprise. She will assist with monitoring and, if necessary, with evacuation. You will retain the orb. You will retain operational control of the investigation." She breathed out. "I will make the necessary notations in the record. Don't make me regret it."
"I shall endeavor not to, Admiral."
"Good." She glanced at something off-screen. "Lieutenant Commander Voss will be joining the Sarek as my liaison. He has prepared logistics on the evacuation contingency. I'd ask you to share the new data with him when you have it."
The hair rose very slightly on the back of Picard's neck. "Voss is joining the Sarek?"
"He is a capable officer. He requested the posting. Is there a difficulty?"
"None, Admiral." Picard kept his face still. He had no grounds. He had a burst header, an unanswered question about a liaison's phone call, and a vague sense of a room with five people in it, and not one of those things was evidence. "I will share the data as it becomes available."
"See that you do." Sorokin paused. "Captain. The data. Mister Data has been compiling a projection. I'd like to see it."
"I have built the model from all available measurements," Data said.
The lab was dark again. A projection filled the air above the central bench, a three-dimensional star chart, deep blue, with the Keldan Reach glittering across it in a thousand points of pale light. Eleven of them were brighter than the rest, each ringed with a thin red circle.
"Each circle represents the drift radius at a known Key site," Data said. "Doria Minor, 9.3 kilometers. Ke'Thara, 4.1. Cirrus Station, now 1.8, reduced following the removal of the Key. Kel-Varesh, not yet measured. And seven more, for which we have only indirect data."
"Seven," Vash said quietly.
"Yes. They have not been visited. Their current radii are estimates."
"And the growth rates?"
"That is the concern." The red circles began to swell. Slowly at first, then steadily, then with visible acceleration, each one pulsing outward across the chart at its own pace. "The accelerant sites are growing exponentially. The damper sites are growing linearly, and slowing. The Keys we have removed have reduced several rates. But the net effect across the network, as of this hour, is growth."
"We've removed the brakes," Vash said.
"We have removed one damper and one accelerant, and recovered one fragment. In each case, the local growth rate fell. But the orb's own field, which has not been reduced, continues to broadcast, and the sites respond to it. The network as a whole is accelerating."
"How long?"
Data touched a control. The chart zoomed. A single small system near the edge of the Reach began to glow, a yellow dwarf with four rocky planets, and on the third, a cluster of faint blue lights. A red circle was spreading across it from a point in the southern hemisphere.
"New Beltane," Data said. "A Federation agricultural colony. Founded fourteen years ago. Four thousand two hundred and sixty-one inhabitants. There is a Key site in its southern continent, in a ruin the colonists did not know was there. The site has been dormant. It is dormant no longer."
"How long?" Picard said.
"The drift radius at the site will reach the outer settlements in thirty-one hours. The main town in thirty-six."
"And what happens to them?"
Data watched him. "I do not know, Captain. No Key site has yet encompassed a population."
The silence was very long. Vash stood with her arms wrapped around her ribs, and Picard saw her eyes go to Dara, who was looking at the glowing colony on the chart with an expression so still, so carefully empty, that it might have been painted on.
"Thirty-one hours," Picard said. "Mister Data. Plot a course for New Beltane. Maximum warp. Commander Riker, inform Captain T'Vel. I want the Sarek in company and every transport she carries. Notify Starfleet Command that we are beginning an evacuation."
"Captain." Dara's voice. "Captain, I—"
"Yes, Ms. Liang?"
She was silent. Then she shook her head, once, slowly. "Nothing. I'm sorry. It's only that it seems very fast."
"It is," Picard said. "I am afraid we have been slow."
He turned, and found Vash looking at him across the dim blue glow of the star chart, her face pale and tight, and understood that she, too, had noticed that Dara had started to say something and stopped. He made no reply. Neither did she. It lay between them like a thing neither of them was yet ready to lift.